Networks have become critical to today's society. Their importance is reflected not only in the number of elements (such as servers, clients, hubs, routers and gateways) that are networked together, but also in the varied and complex ways those elements are interconnected. Undisputably the most widely recognized example of a network is the Internet, which is responsible for interconnecting countless subnets and individual servers and clients.
As networks have become more complex, network management has likewise become more automated and standardized. One widely employed architecture for automatically managing networks adopts a manager/agent topology. Network management stations (NMSs) are employed to supervise agents associated with each element in the network that is to be managed. Each agent has access to a management information base (MIB) that contains data regarding its associated element. The data include, for example, a unique identity for the element, its operating characteristics and the identities of other elements to which it is connected. The NMSs query the various agents for the data from their respective MIBs. These queries, transported to the agents in packets, conform to a standard protocol called the Simple Network Management Protocol, or SNMP.
The data gathered by the NMSs by means of these messages are used to model the network in various known ways. Once a model or models are developed, the operation of the network may be optimized and problems that may occur in the network from time to time can be diagnosed, localized or resolved.
For example, in a network having a server, a router, a gateway and a hub, it is desired to allow an NMS to manage the network. First, the NMS sends a packet containing an SNMP query to, for example, the server. The server's agent responds with one or more packets containing its MIB response. Then, the NMS sends a packet containing another SNMP query to, for example, the router. The router' agent responds with one or more packets containing its MIB response. Then, the NMS sends a packet containing an SNMP query to, for example, the gateway. The gateway's agent responds with one or more packets containing its MIB response. Finally, the NMS sends a packet containing an SNMP query to the hub. The hub's agent responds with one or more packets containing its MIB response.
At the risk of being repetitious, the point is made that gathering MIB information is a serial process. The underlying reason for this is that requests must be fulfilled one at a time. Otherwise, the MIB information from one element can become confused with the MIB information from another element, corrupting the data-gathering process.
Unfortunately, an individual query/response can take a counterintuitively long time. It has been determined that, on average, query/responses in modern Internet Protocol (IP) networks take about a minute to complete. For the exemplary network above, the query/response time is about four minutes.
One minute per element may not at first glance seem to be an inordinate delay, but modern networks may contain many thousands of elements. In such networks, delays of many thousands of minutes before meaningful network management can be put in place is unacceptable. Accordingly, what is needed in the art is a faster way to retrieve the MIB information necessary for modeling a network so networks can come under effective management faster.